Pakistan's Balancing Act

On the political front. Hamid Karzai's rather ill-timed warning to Pakistan a few days ago that the Afghan Army has the right to carry out operations inside Pak territory is a dark omen of the direction the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan could take in the near future. It's no accident that Pakistan is having such a difficult time dealing with the militants in their territory. Why, I have to ask, is it so difficult for a million-man army, trained and equipped by the most advanced army in the world (the U.S.) having such a difficult time defeating a rag-tag band of religious zealots? Incompetence is too facile an answer.

What makes more sense to me is that Pakistan's establishment knows it has to tread lightly with its military or risk its disintegration. Loyalties within the armed forces, especially at the lower ranks, lean heavily toward the Islamists. That structure is another victim of the Soviet war in Afghanistan when fundamentalist ideology was deeply ingrained in the Pakistani army and religious education was expanded throughout the poorer segments of Pakistani society. It's important to remember that the Pak army is not a conscript force. It is voluntary and the lower ranks are largely made up of poor men who have little opportunity to earn a living elsewhere. These are the same poor who are the targets of fundamentalist madrassas. Their road to the army passes through these schools, where they are first indoctrinated with an extreme form of Islam (and in some cases, trained in guerrilla warfare). Once their so-called education is complete, they enter the workforce where they quickly realize that the 'knowledge' they've gained is useless. The only future for them lies in the military.

The lower ranks of the Pak army are filled with these men, men who have a programmed hatred for the West and view the war in Afghanistan as a crusader invasion. For them militant leaders like Mullah Fazlulla, Mehsud and Mangal Bagh are freedom fighters battling the yoke of infidel imperialism. The Pak government, to these men, is a poodle of the West. If that same government orders them to crush the fundamentalist movements, they could very well rebel.

Pakistan's leaders realize this, hence the deal making in Swat and Waziristan - the soft approach. In Swat, they've agreed to let Fazlulla's forces implement their inhuman version of Islamic Law. In Khyber agency, Mangal Bagh has consolidated his power and is expanding his influence into the Orakzai Agency. Government forces have not intervened, instead allowing local tribal opponents to confront Bagh's influence. A tribal war has ensued (only very recently was a truce declared).

I met Mangal Bagh in one of his safehouses in Bara a few months ago. He impressed me with his charisma. He was a very self-assured leader who spoke clearly of his desire to bring the 'true' Islam back to Pakistan. Like the Taliban before him in Afghanistan, his militia had made the Bara district, which was a hub of kidnappings, robberies, and murders, safer. He was diplomatic in his perspectives on the Pakistani government, careful not to directly confront them at a stage when he was still consolidating his power base. But he offered some veiled warnings, namely that the authorities should not interfere in what he claimed was a popular movement.

This is how these militants operate. They emerge in a neglected region, where government incompetence has abandoned the local people to the whims of criminals. They eliminate these criminals (and often take over their enterprises - in Mangal Bagh's case, control of drug smuggling). They speak convincingly of the degradation of Islamic values which they claim is the cause of the peoples' woes and proceed to impose their own version of Islamic Law. The peace this brings is initially welcomed by the people. But then they realize at what cost - freedom of choice, the ability to determine their own destinies. Over time, they realize life hasn't improved for them under this radical Islamist leadership but by then, it's too late. The Baghs and the Mehsuds have consolidated their power. Dissension is suicide.

I met Mangal Bagh at the early stages of his rise. Before brutality had set in. What didn't impress me about him was his militia - a juvenile band of thugs who looked like they couldn't hit a beachball at ten paces. And yet they were in control in Bara despite the fact that Pakistan's Frontier Corps had a presence in the main market. Why? One incident was, for me, telling:

After interviewing Bagh, I received his permission to walk around the market area and take some photographs. "No problem," he told me. "My men will accompany you. You will not be harmed." I walked around openly, until I was stopped by one of the Frontier Corps soldiers. He was not as accommodating as Bagh. "You can't photograph here!" he barked. I told him that Mangal Bagh had given me permission and pointed out the two armed militia men who had been shadowing me on my tour. The soldier wavered. "Oh," he said. "Okay. Go ahead."

It wasn't fear, I felt, that had softened the soldier's resolve. It was, rather, respect - respect for the peace Bagh had brought to the area, respect for his defiance of the Musharraf regime, and more worryingly, respect for the Islamo-fascist ideology that men like Bagh represent. If the Pak army is infiltrated with this ideology, then any escalation in the war in Afghanistan, any move that brings that war to Pakistan will be a total disaster. Pakistan's army will fragment leading to a full-blown civil war. And at this point, I fear who would win that war.

The Road Less Taken

Some frightening statistics:

• In 2006, opium production in Afghanistan rose 61% over 2005


• Profits from drug trafficking is now equivalent to one-third of the nation's GDP


• over 90% of the world's heroin comes from Afghanistan

This despite an aggressive eradication program and a fatwa against growing opium issued by Afghanistan's official clerics. And yet, the industry is booming. This year will be another record harvest. Drug lords, including members of Afghanistan's government, can expect lucrative profits and little fear of arrest considering that the vast majority of the government's counter-narcotics budget is devoted to eradication, not counter-trafficking. But eradication works a little like whack-the-mole: you destroy a field and it pops up somewhere else (opium poppies grow fast and need little care). In many cases, the mole and the whacker are also business partners so the whacking is selective; the game is fixed. I saw this first hand when one of my police sources gave me a heads up on an eradication mission heading out from Kabul into Nangarhar Province. My fixer and I followed them and caught up to the eradication team just after they'd ploughed through a field in an area literally carpeted with opium. One field, less than an acre, was destroyed. The rest were left alone. I spoke with the farmer, a distraught father of 3 who said he would not be able to feed his family now that his only source of income was gone. I asked him why his field had been destroyed and not the others. "I couldn't afford to pay the bribe to the police," he said.

And so it goes in Afghanistan. The power brokers get fat while the vast majority of the rural poor suffer. Eradication is a cover for profiteering (some government sources tell me that the next man in line to take over the Ministry of Anti-Narcotics is himself a drug lord). It has only worked once - in Thailand where destruction of opium fields was run in parallel with a massive alternative livelihoods program. Afghanistan has no such program, nor will it in the foreseeable future, not while the government is so corrupt and any industry with the potential to make money is greedily controlled by a select few - mining for example, potentially a multi-billion dollar industry in mineral-rich Afghanistan; but rather than building it up, expanding local capacity and giving locals the opportunity to benefit from it, the government has banned mining without a license, turning instead to foreign companies who can afford to pay the exorbitant fees for mining rights. Who benefits? Government officials who now rub elbows with multinational corporations eager to gain a foothold in Afghanistan's neglected mining sector.

It sounds hopeless, but it's not. There are alternatives, alternatives that require creative thought and courage. The problem is, foreign governments, especially the U.S., want the problem solved NOW. "Let's get it done," they say in their typically balls-and-brawn way. "Crush the industry. This is a War on Drugs!" Unfortunately, that's just not the way it goes in Afghanistan.

Solving Afghanistan's drug problem requires a multi-pronged approach. Eradication should be a part of the solution, not the holy grail. Domestic expansion of other sectors, like mining, so that the people of Afghanistan themselves are beneficiaries is another piece of the puzzle. A third should be trying to divert some of the industry to legal medicinal use, a licensing program of the type that has been so successful in places like India and Turkey. This is a controversial approach. Its critics, including the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC), say Afghanistan is too unstable to run a legal opiate industry. They also point out that there is no shortage of opiate-based drugs (morphine and codeine) in the world and flooding the market with Afghan opium would risk destabilizing the tenuous balance between demand for painkillers and supply. The overflow would be diverted to the illicit industry. These are legitimate concerns, but unwarranted.

In terms of stability, this is a chicken-and-egg problem. Afghanistan's instability is in large part due to its illicit drugs. Eradication is increasing instability by alienating poor farmers. Licensing opium would not only reduce the amount of opium feeding the illicit market but also create a working relationship between rural Afghans and the government. The countryside is the primary source of instability in the country. Bringing villages into a cooperative enterprise with the government would increase stability. Of course, this would have to happen over time - you can't simply dive into a nationwide licensing program. Instead, you start with pilot projects, village by village. In a tribal culture like Afghanistan's, that's the way progress will work: one village signs up, it benefits, other villages see this benefit and want to repeat it. The only successful development programs in Afghanistan work on this model, in other words, within the existing culture.

Lessons can be learned from the Taliban's experience with opium. In 2000, they managed to stop opium cultivation virtually overnight. Their method: fatwas issued by their leaders, who happened to be respected by the people. Government affiliated clerics can issue all the fatwas they want but it won't make an iota of difference if they have no credibility with the people. Working at the village level means working with local clerics, men who have sway, whose voices carry some weight. You will never convince these men to tell their people to stop growing opium when opium is, in many cases, the only source of income. But what you can do is convince them to cooperate with a government licensing program. The most powerful tool at the Afghan government's disposal is the village mullah, but instead of building relationships with these men, they're destroying them.

Does the world need more morphine? There are two ways to look at this: first, the viewpoint UNODC and other organizations take is that the current supply of opium is meeting world demand. To me, this doesn't make any sense when 74% of the world's supply is consumed by the 7 richest countries (mostly by the U.S.). How could it be that the remaining 26% is enough to meet the needs of Africans and Asians when AIDS and cancer are on the rise? Well, from the UNODC's perspective, it is. Are they implying that there is less of a demand for palliative care in developing nations? That's preposterous. The fact is, in these countries there is a lack of knowledge among medical practitioners about the benefits of opiate-based drugs to treat the sick. The drugs aren't being prescribed. The World Health Organization as well as UNODC both agree that this is the case. They also agree that morphine and codeine are legitimate drug treatment regimes. So, another way to assess this apparent balance between supply and demand is that it is a false equilibrium, that in fact, if medical knowledge is increased in the developing world, the demand for these drugs would skyrocket.

Afghanistan has the potential to meet that future demand. But it will take a global effort to make that potential a reality. One organization (who will remain nameless) trying to convince the world to take this approach seriously has met with brutal resistance. They've been threatened with arrest, with eviction from Afghanistan and even death at the hands of the drug lords. But this was not always the case. When they first proposed the licensing option to the Afghan government, the response was positive. Afghanistan's Minister for anti-narcotics at the time was all for it. "He was ready to sign an agreement to start a pilot licensing project," my source told me. "He told us he would sign the agreement after he returned from a trip to Washington. He came back and suddenly the whole project was off the table."

No surprise. The U.S. has a lot invested in the current opium licensing regime. As it stands, it has an agreement with Turkey and India wherein American pharmaceuticals are required to buy 80% of their opium from these two countries (the 80-20 rule). Expanding the licensing regime to include Afghanistan threatens this agreement. So the U.S. position, which ultimately guides Afghan policy, is political (both Turkey and India are critical allies of the U.S.).

So while the U.S. plays at realpolitick, the world's poor die in pain and Afghanistan comes apart at the seams. The road less traveled sits empty while the American-constructed highway heading for war (War on Terror, War on Drugs) is stuck in a traffic jam. That's the reality, and it sucks.

Reclaiming Identities

Not all's lost in Afghanistan. A few weeks ago, a shipment from the Afghan Museum in Exile in Switzerland landed on the doorstep of the National Museum in Kabul. It's still sitting there, a potent symbol of the painfully slow pace of progress. But at least I feel comfortable using the word "progress" in the Afghan context. There is progress.

Afghanistan's treasures rival Egypt, if not in scale, then in quality and variety. The largest artefacts, the Bamiyan Buddhas, were destroyed by what I referred to in my last post as the Taliban's religious reductionism. Countless others were obliterated by the civil war, looters, more Taliban zealots and the wrath of nature, but these 1 400 pieces survived, along with an unknown number of others locked away somewhere in the dungeons of the Presidential Palace.

Afghanistan's history is coming out of hiding - in bits and pieces of course, as stolen artefacts are located, shattered ceramics delicately reassembled, statues re-excavated from rubble, stories patched together from a jumbled mess of ideology, hatred and greed. The disintegration of the museum is a sad but salient reminder of what some people will do for a sip from the goblet of power - steal a peoples' history, demolish it, crush identities and reduce multiple selves to a manageable singularity. Over 70% of Afghanistan's cultural history is still missing, circulating among profiteers who place their own selfish desire for wealth above the shared history of humankind.

But history is not so easily defeated. In Kabul, it's showing just how resilient it can be. The museum is on the mend, rising out of the rubble like a New Iram. Its first show will open on April 25th - an exhibition of photographs of the Tashqurghan Bazaar before and after it was leveled by fighting between the Soviet Red Army and Afghan mujahideen in the mid-1980s by writer, photographer and ethnographer Dr. Roelof J. Munneke. From what I've seen, it's a moving tribute to what has been lost and a determined statement for what can be saved (full story to be published in the travel section of the Hindustan Times shortly).

The Museum should be fully operational by sometime in mid-Summer. Some pics:

War and Peace - Afghanistan's

National Museum on the mend

Rebuilding

Dr. Munneke - Reclaiming Identities,

photos from Tashqurghan Bazaar

Dr. Munneke - promotional cards

Seated Boddhisatva Statue from Kunduz

4th-6th Century C.E.

Pre-Islamic wood figure

Nuristan

Afghanistan - Missing Voices

Trying to see Afghan society with new eyes, with what I consider to be sight unencumbered by filters. In this case, the filter I've discarded is the one that tries to reduce identities to an essential, Platonic core. Pashtuns are such a way, Tajiks are inclined to such and such, Hazaras and Turkomens...these facile categories confuse rather than clarify; they muddy the picture.

Not to say these ethnic groups don't exist in Afghanistan, they certainly do and there is something to be said about the tensions between them. Those tensions, I think now, are a product of the categories themselves, a by-product of syllogistic reductionism that leaves us with an easy-to-use lexicon for the discussion of Afghans but at the expense of the reality of Afghanistan itself. The problem is that by framing the discussion this way, by capturing and controlling the language, we create the images, we set the boundaries and we set the cycle of conflict in motion.

Ironically, during the Russian occupation, it was the exact opposite situation: Lenin's socialism tried to eliminate all difference; it was an all-encompassing reductionism, the reducing of distinct cultures into a homogeneous whole. That failed. The modern, liberal-inspired reduction of Afghan society into distinct ethnic groups which are then subvidived into tribes and clans will also fail. Both approaches to Afghanistan anchor themselves in the extremes and inevitably lead to policies that do nothing to address the actual needs of Afghans. U.S. and Pakistani policy, for example, manipulates tribal and clan distinctions in a hopeless effort to achieve some sort of strategic advantage, a strategic peace that will be beneficial to them.

Unfortunately, some powerful Afghans have bought into this reductionist strategy (and it is a strategy, conscious or not), whereby guarding their own interests means playing to the interest of one group or another. Karzai himself is playing the game. Rather than appeal to the multiple identities that exist in every Afghan, he appeals at times to ethnic identity, at another to national identity at still another to tribal and clan identities, depending on his strategic needs. In the end, he ends up looking like a player. Afghans pick up on this and that's why so many mistrust the central government.

The Taliban, on the other hand, like the Russians, tried to reduce Afghan identity to a singularity, one based on their image of the pious Muslim. All Afghans are Muslims, therefore all Afghan women must where the burqa, all men must have beards long enough to clench in a fist and dress in the traditional shalwar kameez. Other identities rebelled against this idea and formed the Northern Alliance, in part to protect their identities but also to inflict upon Afghanistan those same identities. That is what is happening now, now that the Northern Alliance is in power.

Many Pashtuns, as a result, are not happy. What they see is a government whose central mission is to wipe their way of life out of existence, especially in the south and east where Pashtun identity is the most crystallized. But the fact remains that in these regions there are people who speak for Pashtuns, not the Jihadist Taliban whose inspiration is the apocalyptic vision of the End of Days, but the Pashtun leaders (who also call themselves Taliban - students of Islam) who are genuinely protecting the Pashtun way of life. This way of life is also a part of Afghanistan, regardless of how much some in the current government and others in the world community may despise that identity. Engaging them, bringing them into the political fold will finally give the Pashtuns a voice in government, a voice that is, at the present time, conspicuously absent.

I'll end this post with a few pics:

Stolen histories and a couple pics

An opinion piece on Afghanistan I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

If timing is a measure of wisdom, then Canada’s Senators can finally start calling themselves the wise old men of the political establishment. Their report on Afghanistan, released on February 12 essentially berating some NATO members in Afghanistan for their cowardice, has one thing going for it: it came out just when its message was most likely to be heard – only weeks before a spring offensive, which Taliban leaders have described as an all-or-nothing battle for the south, and at a time when the U.S. and Britain, both floundering in Iraq, are shuffling their attention back to the little war they conveniently forgot.

Britain, abandoning its mess in Mesopotamia, is re-directing its troops to beleaguered Helmand province, a 1400-strong contingent that, according to its military commanders, will support operations in the entire south, including Kandahar, where Canadians are based. There is also talk in Washington of a troop surge in Afghanistan as President George W. Bush, in the twilight of his presidency, feverishly hunts for a military success that will afford him some meaningful legacy. For its part, Canada is pumping in more cash, $200 million dollars more for reconstruction, on top of the $1 billion promised over the next 10 years.

That all makes Canada’s Senators look like straight-A students, an illusion bolstered by the fact that much of the information coming out of Afghanistan, the same information used by the Senators to compile their report, is hopelessly skewed by a Western perspective that views Afghan society with condescension.

Last week, French diplomats, annoyed by the accusation that their troops are idling away their Afghan deployment in the relatively peaceful north, called the Senators’ bluff. In the process, they also exposed the damage the senate report has the potential to cause, not only by weakening the unity of NATO but also by strengthening the Taliban’s own propaganda machine which feeds off and exploits the perceptions of Afghanistan’s Pashtuns, the ethnic group most affected by the war and to which the Taliban themselves belong.

Those perceptions are shaped by the symbols housed in messages, or as one of Canada’s greatest thinkers of the 20th century once said, in the medium which is the message. That shining pearl of actual wisdom applies to more than just the media; Canada’s Senators could learn a lesson or two from Marshall McLuhan’s signature quote. Their report sent a very specific message; and it was not a good one. To the Afghans, who know better than anyone else that the Taliban will never be defeated militarily, it said: NATO is here to fight, that’s its purpose. To Canadians it said: the war is what’s important. Both messages are wrong. More than wrong, they bypass the difficult questions Canadians need to be asking.

Those questions are deceivingly straightforward: What does Afghanistan need? Would more troops in the south help bring peace?

The war in Afghanistan, as any military expert will tell you, is not about troop levels; thinking in those terms is a little old-school (which is, fittingly, what the Senate itself represents in Canadian politics). This war is not a conventional fight where every man and woman on the battlefield represents an asset. “Fighting in Afghanistan is not only about having more men on the ground…” a senior French diplomat correctly pointed out in response to the Senate report. In many cases, too many troops can be a liability, providing robust targets for Taliban insurgents carrying out suicide attacks and setting roadside bombs. No, more troops will not help the situation. Just the opposite, in fact: in a head-to-head fight, Canada’s current combat deployment in Kandahar alone, all well-trained soldiers armed to the teeth, could take on the ragtag band of farmers-cum-fighters called the Taliban. More combat troops would make little difference. More special forces perhaps, definitely more specialized soldiers with experience fighting a guerrilla insurgency. This is where some NATO members could play a significant role - Turkey, for example, the second-largest member of NATO with a long history of fighting a grassroots insurgency in, like Afghanistan, a mountainous region of its own. But Turkey’s NATO contingent is currently holed up in Kabul, running development projects in a region super-saturated with development projects.

But even then, even if Turkey decides to deploy south, that would not solve the Afghan puzzle. There is no skeleton key to open the door to peace in Afghanistan, or any other indigenous uprising, a lesson Turkey has learned in its own fight against Kurdish separatists (that war is still waging, more than 15 years after it started). What’s needed instead is a complete re-think of what peace will look like in a nation whose shattered identity is scattered over its remote mountain terrain like razor-sharp shards of glass. Canada could play the lead in that perceptual revolution.

Pumping more money into an economy already addicted to aid will not spur that revolution. The additional $200 million promised by Canada, injected into a society rife with corruption and graft, will only fatten the beast even more. Here is how the Harper government intends to spend that extra cash, and why its plans are so misguided:

• $120 million for governance and development

Money will not solve Afghanistan’s governance problems when the institutions that money is intended to support are foreign and alien to the Afghan people. The net result is a system of nepotism that has only served to divide Afghans rather than unite them. In development terms, that means contracts are often awarded to companies with connections in government, concentrating wealth and angering the masses of poor Afghans who have yet to see any benefits from the aid money pouring into their country.

• $30 million for anti-narcotics

Read this as more money for the disastrous U.S.-led poppy eradication program. During the course of that program, opium output has reached record levels, providing much needed funding to the Taliban while simultaneously angering poor Afghan farmers who now face a War on Drugs in the midst of a war in the conventional sense. That is an acidic mix which has pushed many farmers into the arms of the Taliban. Money and fighters, that is what the eradication program has given the Taliban insurgency, and that is what Canadian taxpayers’ money will fund. An alternative, proposed by the Senlis Council, a think tank based in Europe, which would convert some of Afghanistan’s opium crop into a legitimate industry for medicinal use has received little attention, in large part because of aggressive U.S. opposition. Canada’s money would be better spent exploring this option.

• $20 million for policing

Again, it’s not money that is the problem with Afghanistan’s woefully inadequate police force, it’s the methodology used to recruit, train, and deploy police units on to Afghanistan’s divided streets. A recent move to recruit men from local populations into an auxiliary force to police communities is a step in the right direction but more needs to be done to ensure these units serve the interests of the whole community and not individual clan groups. This will require innovative thinking about what an Afghan police force should look like and not simply the application of a Western-inspired policing template.

• $20 million for de-mining

This is a worthy cause in a nation studded with landmines. More money should be allocated here, especially considering Canada’s leading role in eliminating landmines worldwide.

• $10 million for road construction

A feel-good program which NATO constantly references in its ‘Afghan success stories.’ But the reality is, especially in southern provinces like Kandahar, new roads are perceived by the local population as serving the military needs of the occupying forces (eerily similar to what happened during the Russian occupation when Soviet-built roads were targeted by mujahideen because they represented a military advantage to the occupiers). This is not a mistaken point-of-view: in southern Afghanistan, as soon as a new road is laid down, it is crawling with NATO armoured vehicles. Until roads offer a tangible advantage to the average Afghan villager, they will continue to be perceived as serving the strategic needs of foreign forces. That advantage is intimately bound to the reason why humans began building roads in the first place – for trade. Afghanistan’s south has no trade to justify road construction. In a sense, building them is a slap in the face of Afghans, as if to say, “We will build them and our armies will come.”

What’s missing in all of these initiatives is a genuine regard for who Afghans are and what they want. When the Senate report refers to Afghan society as “medieval” it falls into the same trap countless invaders of this virulently independent region have fallen into. To see Afghanistan through the prism of one’s own history is to sweep away the rich history of Afghanistan itself, ironically something the Taliban, when it was in power, tried to do. Democracy, for example, has as much, if not more of a history in Afghanistan than Canada, albeit not the type of democracy most Canadians would recognize. But fundamentally, the Pashtun tribal culture’s governance by consensus, through councils of elders, is a version of democracy that deserves its own development. It’s rather myopic to call on something as relative and contrived as the 21st-century as a measure of a nation’s modernity. The fact is, the 21st-century means something very different to most people in the world than the implied Age of Enlightenment to which the Senate report alludes. In those terms, most of the world is still medieval.

Unfortunately, tribalism has undermined Afghanistan’s democratic development, as has foreign manipulation of the country’s tribal structures. Pakistan and the U.S. especially have taken advantage of clan rivalries to achieve their own strategic needs. They continue to do so. Canada should stand up and say this is wrong. It undermines NATO’s efforts and further fractures a country beset by fault lines. Furthermore, the current government in Kabul reflects the deep ethnic fissures that have divided Afghan society since the civil war of the 1990’s. The trauma of that dark decade will not be easily forgotten and having a ruling elite that excludes Pashtuns is a reminder to the people of Afghanistan that the era of sectarian strife is not over. Canada should pressure Afghan authorities to form a more ethnically diverse government, one that doesn’t include men who are accused of war crimes and who are aligned with sectarian factions accused of crimes against humanity during the civil war.

Then, perhaps, Afghanistan’s healing can begin. Canada can play a major role in that healing process, not by spouting ultimatums and pouring more money into what has so far been a poorly directed project, but by genuinely working toward a future that will be Afghan in its nature and not an imported vision. This is what the majority of Afghans want, and ultimately what some Afghans are still fighting for. This is the message we should be sending.

In Orientalism, one of Edward Said's central arguments revolves around the idea of appropriated identities. Oriental identity, he argues, has been shaped by foreign, mostly European, symbols for centuries. Oriental history, if I can bring this into my own logical framework, has become the almost exclusive domain of western institutions (of the academic Orientalist, or the Middle Eastern policy specialist, or the Occidental writer and artist). Those symbols claim to represent the Oriental mind, its motivations, its inner workings and its outer expressions. To say this is egotistical misses the point. That it evolves out of a power dynamic or, as Said says, an "ethos of domination" is beyond doubt. But what's most important in this perspective is the recognition that the way we in the west see the east is through the prism of these appropriated histories, these facile symbols consciously or unconsciously designed to make the Oriental fit into an acceptable mould of "Otherness."

This, I believe, is the root of the problem in NATO's Afghanistan project, as well as Iraq. This is not to say the power brokers in the West haven't learned from past mistakes. They no longer talk about "civilizing" backward people, or ruling for the benefit of the ruled. This sort of colonial phraseology doesn't cut it these days. But the sad fact is that the philology of domination still infects the English language into this the 21st century. Terms like "modernizing" and "institutional development" remain firmly rooted in the history of appropriation. When the U.S. promises to strengthen Iraq's institutions so that a stable democracy can flourish, it is still using the lexicon of domination: whose institutions are these really? Whose democracy? Is the vision of the Iraqi future the U.S. promotes a genuinely Iraqi future or just another in a long line of futures projected from the West on to the East? In other words, do these futures evolve out of an eastern or western history?

The same questions can be applied to Afghanistan. They key point here is that Iraqis and Afghans are not ignorant people; they know when their histories are being colonized. And they will fight that colonization. That is only natural.

On a lighter note, a couple of pics of me and my girlfriend at Araf last night: